Let Gilmore provide the vision and let the rest of us repossess our own Republic

WHEN Brian Cowen became Taoiseach, the litmus test of his style was whether he would reshuffle Mary Harney.

A young woman of immense moral courage in her time, an able Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, her decision to take on the Byzantine monster of Health and Children was a gamble too far.

There is no room in governance for sentiment or for the cosseting of pals, especially in a national emergency. But Cowen did not reshuffle her, or others. He never realised the cosy mixture as before would not suffice and that an altogether different style of captaincy was needed.

!There is a betting certainty that sheer incompetence will continue to haunt the Cowen cabinet on a regular basis. And these are the people to whom we have mortgaged our future. The question now is not if but when the Greens will walk. The convention is they must wait for the “right” issue. But hesitation can rapidly become irrelevance.

Senator Dan Boyle’s own political future is all but terminal. He will not be nominated to the Senate after the next election. Nor is it likely, in an election in which (on current forecasts) most of his Dáil colleagues will lose their seats, that he will buck that trend and return to the Dáil.

But having tweeted and been credited with a Pyrrhic scalp, he subsided into a characteristic Hamletic haze of word-splitting. You gave him a front-page soapbox (Irish Examiner, February 19) on which he could have reinvented himself and his party, but what he wrote was all but unintelligible.

The Greens will stay. Probably, as Michael McDowell here or Claire Short in Britain could tell them ruefully, until it is too late. The Green chief whip, Ciarán Cuffe, says from now on the relationship between Fianna Fáil and the Greens in Government will be “crisper”. What does he mean? Snap, crackle and pop? Or that the temperature in the cabinet room will fall to the sub-zero levels at which biofuel freezes and bones crumble?

Beneath a superficial popular discontent is the very real dread not just of a continuing downward socio-economic spiral, but the deeper dread that, after all, we may be a nation of losers – or worse.

Insufficient attention has been paid to the link between the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and the Ryan/Murphy reports, and their combined impact on our national self-esteem. Combined, of course, with the relentless demolition (in some cases, flogging-off) of our symbols of national identity, the reminders of our solidarity as a national community. Now is the time for Eamon Gilmore to set out in clear language an alternative positive vision for Ireland. To indicate that, say, using the 1994 precedent, a small number of TDs who are willing to be true patriots could stop the fall right now – not wait, as so many did during the bad weather, for someone else to shovel the snow from our doorsteps.

We could have an alternative government within days. But that requires not only that Eamon Gilmore offers us real alternative leadership, but that we ourselves repossess of our own Republic.

Maurice O’Connell

Fenit

Tralee

Co Kerry